LIVING THROUGH EXTREMES IN PROCESS DRAMA

Adam Bethlenfalvy

• Éditeur: Harmattan Hongrie
• Année: 2020
• ISBN de l'eBook: 9782336907260
• Sujet: Scienze sociali
• Sujet: Sociologia

Living trough extremes in process drama is an exploration of integrating Edward Bond's theatre theory and practice into the "living trough" approach to process drama. Adam Bethlenfalvy examines the basic components of the "living trough" approach to drama trough the analysis of the practice of Dorothy Heathcote, Gavin Bolton, Cecily O'Neill and David Davis.Trough a series of drama lessons, the author explores how participants can be supported in making drama of depth on their own with moments that dislocate dominant social explanations from within the narrative, urging those watching or participating to make their own meanings of events in the drama. Trough the book does not offer ready-made solutions, it offerts some exciting new recognitions coming from re-kindling the connection between theatre and drama education.

CHAPTER ONE: LIVING THROUGH DRAMA

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The phrase ‘Living Through Drama’ does not have a Hungarian translation. One reason for this is that it has not been part of the most accepted Hungarian drama teacher training course,27 founded by Laszló Kaposi. This course and its founder defined the established practice of drama in education and offered the model for other courses that prepared drama teachers in Hungary. The approach represented by Kaposi was reinforced through publications28 of volumes of lesson plans for different age-groups and more importantly the ‘Drámapedagógiai olvasókönyv’29 [Dramapedagogy Reader] which remains the most concise collection of writings published in Hungarian. The spine of my copy of this book is broken due to overuse at the collection of Jonothan Neelands’ conventions, the forms that the drama teacher can use to structure lessons. Though the first English language publication30 of the conventions is accompanied by almost thirty pages of theory to help structuring lessons, the Hungarian Reader does not contain this. The predominantly methodological line of Kaposi’s drama approach is the most conspicuously visible in how Dorothy Heathcote’s seminal writing titled Signs and Portents31 is published in the Reader; while the list of 33 forms she offers are there, the theoretical grounding and analysis of the use of sign in theatre and drama, Heathcote’s definition of the three major components of drama was never published in Hungarian.

I am describing this context because it strongly connects with the professional dissatisfaction that led me to pursue this PhD research and the choice of territories to explore in it. As someone working mostly in theatre in education I really missed the creative excitement of making theatre in the lessons I did with children, but because the forms, the conventions were at the centre of attention I felt I did not have appropriate tools at hand. The logic of the conventions also dictated some rational learning coming out of the drama lessons through the reflective conventions that aid the articulation of the understanding created through engaging with the story.

I recognised some of my problems as a drama teacher in David Davis’s analysis when he states that the conventions are not used “as part of the overall complex structure of the drama work. Instead they lend themselves to becoming the total method of work employed in a drama lesson. They are relatively easy to teach and can bring some ‘success’ relatively quickly. What is missing is the deep theoretical embedding which a teacher would need to have to make use of them”.32 I also recognised Davis’s33 claim about the misrepresentations of Living Through Drama (referred to as LTD from here on) in a minor, but extremely significant mistranslation. Heathcote’s emblematic starting questions connected to her LTD phase of “what should we make a play about?”, is known in Hungary as “what should we play about?”.34 The translation refers to ‘playing’, as in children’s dramatic play, while the original ‘making a play’ refers much more strongly to creating a piece of theatre together. The contradiction that the form of drama labelled ‘Living Through’ suggesting a naturalist, experiential form starts with the offer to make theatre was intriguing.

Davis35 proposed a possible avenue for developing the field of drama in education by combining LTD with Edward Bond’s drama theory and practice. I took up his call to research the possibilities of connecting the two in practice because of the reasons above. Bond’s theory and practice offers possibilities of novel ways of engaging with dominant social narratives from within the story that work against a Brechtian distancing. These are discussed in detail in chapter two.

In this chapter I examine the concept of LTD with a novice’s eye, trying to understand what aiming for a living through engagement means practically. After a short survey of how the term appears in literature on drama education I will analyse some examples of LTD. Studying the practice of prominent experts of this approach will benefit the development of my action research. I will look at cases of Dorothy Heathcote’s work, and then at examples of how Gavin Bolton, Cecily O’Neill and David Davis developed the living through form. I will examine the differences between living through and other forms of drama, going on to define those components that show the strongest connections to Bondian drama.

LIVING THROUGH OR LIVING THROUGH?

Experiencing is a synonym of living through which is often used in describing drama. A book that argues for improving schools with drama quotes a student saying “drama is different from anything else at school because you get to really experience real life things and problems”;36 in a publication arguing for using drama in teaching literature, history or languages claims it is useful because “the participants experience a number of scenarios, or ‘episodes’”.37 Winston and Tandy use living through as a synonym of experiencing when they state that drama “can offer valuable opportunities to place learning in real human contexts by making stories and living through them, rather than hearing them told by the teacher”.38 But as an approach LTD comprises much more than experiencing.

John O’Toole defines the LTD as “experiential role-play”39 and states that it “is the dominant specific convention of form used in drama in education, the characters are living through the narrative synchronously”.40 O’Toole puts the emphasis on the “it is happening to us here and now”41 element of the living through form. Michael Fleming, in an interview for this research, describes LTD as “whatever is happening it is unfolding in real time”.42 Besides the immediacy of being in the fictional events, which is central in both definitions, he highlights the progression of the narrative, the importance of something being in change as participants are in it. Fleming offers a more detailed account of ‘living through’ improvisations elsewhere:

These happened at life pace, had unknown outcomes and the meaning was negotiated during the process. Such experiences, when they worked well, provided an extraordinary degree of emotional engagement and excitement through their immediacy. However, because there was less explicit emphasis on making drama, the implicit message was to deny drama as an artificial, fictional ‘construct’.43

Emotional engagement and negotiation during the process are also highlighted as features of living through improvisations, and the much-debated question of this approach’s relationship to drama as an art form is raised. It is worth noting that the quote above is from Fleming’s book, The Art of Drama Teaching which offers possibilities of strengthening ties between the art form and drama education. Here he reflects on work that relied exclusively on living through improvisations. Interestingly, elsewhere Fleming points out about one of the most well-known examples of LTD, a sequence discussed later from the Heathcote film Three Looms Waiting, that “it counts as a very effective piece of rehearsed performance”.44 The contradiction between Fleming’s two statements can be relaxed if we differentiate between living through improvisation and LTD as an approach, and see the former as one component of the latter. As we will see from the examples further on improvisations are important parts of the approach, but rarely do we find lessons that rely exclusively on them.

As drama lessons based on a variety of approaches to drama in education can include living through improvisations it is useful to differentiate between living through drama and Living Through Drama with capital letters. The latter focuses on creating improvisation where participants are in role and experiencing and dealing with some sort of crisis within the fictional situation. I will investigate some lessons in this chapter that can be considered examples of the ‘Living Through Drama’ as a genre or approach to drama education to locate those specific aspects of this genre that differentiate it from other approaches. The term ‘process drama’ is also used by some of the authors discus...

Table des matières

• Cover
• Backcover
• Collection
• Titre
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• FOREWORD
• INTRODUCTION
• CHAPTER ONE: LIVING THROUGH DRAMA
• CHAPTER TWO: WHAT IS A DRAMA EVENT?
• CHAPTER THREE: BRINGING TOGETHER THE ARTISTIC AND THE EDUCATIONAL PRAXIS
• CHAPTER FOUR: RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
• CHAPTER FIVE: DATA ANALYSIS
• CHAPTER SIX: CONTEXT AND FURTHER USE OF THE FINDINGS OF MY ACTION RESEARCH
• REFERENCES
• APPENDICES
• A SOROZATBAN EDDIG MEGJELENT
• Adresse